Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and the race to ridicule America's next president

Stop me if you've heard this one: Hillary Clinton is…super-ambitious and inauthentic! Ha! Laughing yet? Probably not. But after eight years of Barack Obama, will we finally get a president who generates some real comedy?

We might, but Saturday Night Live's attempt last weekend for a pre-announcement satire of Clinton wasn't particularly strong, despite cast member Kate McKinnon's ample talents. It relied on those two ideas about Clinton, presented without a great deal of subtlety. (Told by an aide to look natural as she records her announcement video, she sticks her face in the camera and shouts, "Citizens! You will elect me! I will be your leader!".) There's time to develop that character, though, even if after all this time, we still lack a definitive comedic impression of Barack Obama.

It isn't that late-night comedians haven't made plenty of jokes about Obama, or that impressionists don't imitate his voice, because they do. But it turned out that his character was hard to mine for comedy. His "no drama Obama" demeanor — never too hot, always under control — just doesn't lend itself to the kind of exaggeration that impressions rely on. You need someone with a big personality, full of characteristics that can be heightened for effect. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had that, which is why the SNL sketches with Darrell Hammond and Will Ferrell playing them (respectively) were so good so often. The best impression of Obama currently in circulation is probably what Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key of Key & Peele do, which involves an "anger translator" named Luther who enacts all the emotions Obama won't permit himself to. It's a clever way to simultaneously examine and get around the fact that Obama himself isn't easy to mock in a funny way.

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The key to a better Hillary Clinton impression may lie in what Ferrell did with Bush. What made Ferrell's impression so great was the fact that it went beyond the basic joke that Bush was stupid, which isn't all that funny and gets old pretty fast. Ferrell's Bush wasn't just stupid — he played him as an idiot who was trying really hard to convince everyone that he was smart, and believed that he was just killing it. It was those multiple layers, where the swagger met the simpleton, that made it cutting.

One could certainly imagine a similar satire of Hillary Clinton — not just that she's inauthentic, but that she knows she is, yet believes she's convincing everyone she's as genuine as all get-out. And perhaps McKinnon or someone else will capture some essence of Clinton we haven't fully understood, the way Hammond brought out the joy Bill Clinton took in driving his enemies crazy.

To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone should make fun of Hillary Clinton for being inauthentic. Authenticity is one of the most overused and unhelpful concepts in campaign journalism. As I've been arguing for years, the candidates who are belittled for their lack of authenticity, like Mitt Romney or Al Gore, are merely the ones whose portrayals of authenticity don't measure up. George W. Bush was in truth no more authentic than Gore; he was just a better actor, and he was rewarded for that by being described as a reg'lar fella. Even the most genuine politician is not "himself" when he's chatting with some patrons in a diner while a dozen cameras arrayed in a semicircle around them record every moment.

But like it or not, the authenticity rap is stuck on Clinton, as is the idea that she's disturbingly ambitious. The latter is a charge that almost no male politician ever gets. Are we supposed to believe that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Scott Walker isn't every ounce as ambitious as Clinton? They're running for president, for Pete's sake — that takes an almost pathological ambition. Which no one can admit to, of course; you have to say you're running only because you care so deeply about the future of America.

But those Republicans don't seem all that funny, either. Ted Cruz has a combination of grandiosity and creepiness to him that a comedian might be able to do something with, but let's be honest: he's not going to be the GOP nominee. There's something amusing about Rand Paul, though it's a little hard to put your finger on just what it is. But if you wanted to make hilarious jokes about Bush or Walker or Rubio, what would you say?

Comedians, particularly the late-night comics (and the people who write for them) have always been able to take one or two features of a politician's personality and produce endless iterations of the same couple of jokes. Bill Clinton is horny, John McCain is old, George W. Bush is dumb, rinse, repeat. We don't yet know what they're going to say about the GOP candidates, but they could take a cue from what is probably the best piece of political humor of the Obama years, The Onion's ongoing chronicles of Joe Biden. They took Biden's weird loosey-goosey unpredictability (and priceless moments like this one) and spun them into a character whose misadventures are endless, and who is simultaneously nothing like Biden yet couldn't be anyone else. Could you do that with somebody as dull as Jeb Bush? Let's hope so.